The Rhetorics and Aesthetic of Memory, Graduate Conference
Keynote speaker: Prof. Michael Rothberg Professor and Head of the Department of English, and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Memory functions in several multifaceted dimensions: individual, familial, local, regional, national, and international. Whether memory can be read as an individual construction or as national one, whether it is a negotiation of trauma or a tool for the construction of individual or national identity, artists have explored the concept through various strategies, media, and across history. We invite papers that discuss how the question of memory impacts art and visual culture throughout history.
Themes may include, but are not limited to:
- art as reconfiguration of individual memory
- construction of photo albums and familial memory
- negotiations of trauma
- representations of national or collective memory
- challenging existing representations of memory
- historical memory
- use of technology to disseminate individual or collective memory
- testimony as exercise of memory
- spectral spaces and geographies; phenomena of ‘haunting’
- memorialization
- material culture, sacred objects, culturally or politically charged objects
- theories on affect; performativity of affect
- museums, archives, and records as sites or spaces of memory
- socio-political critique through memory
- parsing biography and autobiography
- ‘active’ forgetting
Please send 300 word abstracts and questions to rascagrad[at]gmail.com